Bohemia Interactive, developer of tactical shooter ARMA II, has released a printed map collection for the fictional country of Chernarus, made famous as the setting for the DayZ zombie survival RPG. We take a hands-on look at these maps and assess their suitability for your next adventure.

Few could have predicted the sudden and massive popularity that has greeted the DayZ mod for military sim game ARMA II. As it turns out, a crushingly difficult representation of a zombie apocalypse — one where simply finding food and clean water is a challenge — is just what the doctor ordered.

Along with this crushing difficulty comes an aversion to any sort of easily accessible navigation information. A new character in DayZ typically begins their life knowing the name of the nearest town and not much else. Road signs can help point you in the right direction, but most of their lettering is Cyrillic. Even if you can read a sign or two, the playable area of Chernarus is so massive that reaching any given destination within the world is a struggle worthy of Ulysses.

To combat this, resourceful players have been relying upon PDF maps and Google Maps mashups to find their way around, with some even going so far as to print out poster-sized representations of Chernarus to hang on their walls.

The folks at Bohemia Interactive have clearly been keeping tabs on these efforts, as they recently released a printed Chernarus Map Collection for $14.99. This is the same set of maps that you can find in the collector's edition of ARMA II, but offered à la carte from Bohemia's website.

What's in the Box

For your $15, you get:

a fold-out map of Chernarus, Sahrani, Takistan, Shapur, and the Proving Grounds